President speaks at ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the end of hostilities

WASHINGTON 
Six decades after the Korean War ended, President Barack Obama said Saturday that American veterans deserved a better homecoming from a war-weary nation and their legacy is the 50 million people who live freely in a democratic South Korea.

“Here in America, no war should ever be forgotten, and no veteran should ever be overlooked,” he said in a speech at the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the National Mall, where ceremonies marked the 60th anniversary of the end of hostilities on the peninsula.

Obama said the conflict didn’t unite or divide the country the same way World War II or the Vietnam War did, respectively, and that U.S. veterans came home to neither parades nor protests because “there was, it seemed, a desire to forget, to move on” by Americans tired of battle.

But they “deserved better,” Obama said, adding that, on Saturday’s anniversary, “perhaps the highest tribute we can offer our veterans of Korea is to do what should have been done the day you came home.”

He appealed for people to pause and let these veterans “carry us back to the days of their youth and let us be awed by their shining deeds.”

In the audience of several thousand on a sunny and humid morning were dozens of American and Korean veterans of the war.

Obama asked them to stand and be recognized.

The 1950-1953 war had North Korean and Chinese troops on one side against U.S.-led United Nations and South Korean forces. It ended on July 27, 1953, 60 years ago Saturday, with the signing of an armistice.

A formal peace treaty was never signed, leaving the Korean peninsula in a technical state of war and divided at the 38th parallel between its communist north and democratic south. More than 36,000 Americans were killed in the conflict. The U.S. still has 28,500 troops based in the south.

Yet the costs of the war continue to mount even amid relative peace.

Hostility remains between the two Koreas and between the North and the United States, which still has no formal diplomatic relations with the communist nation. That antagonism is rooted in the U.S. commitment to take a lead role in defending the South should war again break out on the peninsula.

Also on Saturday in the capitol of North Korea, goose-stepping soldiers, columns of tanks and a broad array of ominous-looking missiles poised on mobile launchers paraded through Pyongyang’s main square in a painstakingly choreographed military pageant intended to strike fear into its adversaries and rally its people behind young ruler Kim Jong Un on the 60th anniversary of the armistice. Saturday’s parade marks a holiday the North Koreans call “Victory Day in the Fatherland Liberation War,” although the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce and the Korean peninsula remains technically at war.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, President Park Geun-hye vowed not to tolerate provocations from North Korea — Seoul says North Korean attacks in 2010 killed 50 South Koreans — but she also said Seoul would work on building trust with the North.